Server Rebooting Without Warning!?!?

[SATech]

I've got a Dell PowerEdge (6300?) that yesterday began rebooting without notice or record. It happened about every 2hrs until I switched the UPS it was connected to which I thought solved the problem. Some 30hrs later, it has rebooted again and the server that it is sharing the UPS with has been online for days.

The event logs show NOTHING leading up to the reboot. All I see is the messages after the fact logging the "processor is free" followed by the "Events log starting up".

All indicator lights on the front are green as advertised. Can anyone shed some light on the subject??

Thanks in advance! ________
S. Joseph Vergara
SVergara@Texas.net

 

[Tucka]

If the event log is coming up with nothing it sounds like it may be a hardware issue. Have seem it before with if'y power supplies. Have you tried Dell ? is it a known issue ? try h/w diagnositcs

 

[jrdebug]

is the "Automatically Reboot" option ticked on the Startup tab of the System dialog box? most probably it is because ur not even getting the hex dump blue screen. remove the tick. wait for the next incident and try to make out any familiar word or computer component from the screen display. if u find one, try to remove or replace it and restart the server. observe and conclude.

Jeffrey Rebong
Computer Engineer/Network Administrator
jrtech@email.com

 

[Sagal]

are runnning any monitoring software like system sentinel. i have seen a similar problem where the server keep restarting. I have replaced almost every thing memory, cpu, motherboard and power supply without success. Finally I uninstalled that software and problem solved.

 

[SATech]

Thanks for the speedy input folks! This (NT) server has had one of the three redundant power supplies fail before and a yellow indicator light blinked on the front until it I replaced it. I plan to call Dell today for any insight they may be able to provide.

As far as the "Automatically reboot..." option ticked, yes it is, as one would expect to see on a server. Unfortunately, I will have to wait until the weekend to dive in further since this is a very busy file/mail storage server that I can't afford to take down until then. This will also be the opportunity for me to run the diagnostics program.

No software, other than critical updates that were applied a couple of months back have been installed, has been installed.

________
S. Joseph Vergara

 

[badams]

Are you running service pack 6a?

I had problems with service pack 6 where the servers would just reboot. Once I went to 6a the problem stopped.

 

[netinfo]

We had a problem once where our server (which acts as a file/mail/print server) started rebooting, would stay up for a couple of hours and then reboot again.

we observed that free space on our c drive was being eaten up to virtually no free space. (we thought virus)

the hard drive was checked and the only other large file on the c drive was the dump file.

This free space issue happened again and this time we noticed on our c drive a very large print spool file (1.5GB from our graphic department).

Our deduction was that somehow, files on the NT server became corrupt when space ran out on the hard drive.

We ended up reinstalling NT.